Next poetry slam
I’d like to say a quick thanks to Mary McCartney (who did such a great job on the Benedict House art:house festival) – she’s helping me out with promotion for Traverse Poetry events and she put together this wonderful media release for the next slam.
For the benefit of those who want the facts without wading through a media release, the next poetry slam is on:
Friday 27 March
7.30pm – 11.30pm
The Front Gallery and Café, Wattle St, Lyneham
In attendance will be the marvellous Melbourne poet Santo Cazzati (mentioned in this report) who will perform a 20-minute feature set – going to be great!
Meanwhile, I’d be curious to hear what you think of this blog post about the state of poetry. It’s from late last year, but still interesting. What do you think? Is there poetry that is both good on paper and spoken? Are there any good poets that could (should) reach as many children as Harry Potter? Are there any non-crap poetry blogs (aside from this one, of course!)?
interesting. i just caught the final of the national poetry slam on abc2, &, though just about all the performances could be described as ‘energetic’, i’d say less than half of the poems would work well on the page.
page reading offers much more turning over of individual words & lines for the reader, so the depth has to be there. mind you, a lot of ‘page poems’ have very little initial impact, or ‘pow’.
i think there is poetry that works in both ways. how to cultivate it though? print anthologies arising from slams? or performance events based on print texts?
I really wanted to watch it but don’t have digital… hoping it pops up on iView.
The other thing is the whole visual aspect of the poem – the physical structure on the page. My good friend David was telling me the other day he found it interesting comparing his poetry (and that of another performer – Adam Hadley) which comes from a theatre/acting perspective with Seung Baek and mine, whose approach to performance poetry comes more from literature and study of poetry. He thought that the line breaks and structure of sentences in our work were much more significant and interesting to the reader compared to his and Hadley’s (which he described as a mess!).
So, thinking about this, perhaps such poems need to be written with clear intentions to utilise the tools and techniques of both written and read poetry so that the poem succeeds in readings and performance in *different* ways – i.e. the printed version does not try to emulate the same overall effect as achieved through reading. Hope this doesn’t sound like I’m stating the obvious – it’s just something that struck me recently.
The other thing is that some of the best published poetry can’t be really appreciated until one reads it out loud to get all of the sounds and rhythm – yet was not written to be ‘performance poetry’ per se. Thinking here especially about Neil Gaiman’s intro to a new Poe collection and the success of The Raven…
Some jumbled thoughts – do they make any sense at all? Lots to ponder on this topic!